McKinsey's Petroleum Practice helps clients both in meeting their near term performance challenges and in devising strategies to succeed in today's complicated world. We serve many of the world's most important oil companies in North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Our work is balanced between service to the corporate center and to the various business units (e.g., upstream, refining, marketing), on a variety of strategic, organizational, and operational issues. We distinguish ourselves by providing both high-level strategic advice and hands-on approaches to improving performance.

We offer our clients distinctive thinking on strategic issues by continually investing in knowledge development aimed at understanding broader industry issues and trends. Examples of our current research include:

	The New Petroleum Landscape: Over the last decade as many oil and gas markets have opened there is today a growing "shared" world where both majors and NOCs compete. What are the implications of this and other trends and what it will take to win in this new world?
	NOC Performance: With their focus on maximizing a country's resources rather than on creating shareholder value, NOCs typically face significant barriers in achieving high performance levels. What can they do to improve performance?
	Maximizing Value from Legacy Positions: Mature assets account for nearly half of the world's production, and are an essential component of many portfolios. What can players do to unlock the value from a mature portfolio? What implication does this have for their people agenda?
	Accessing Upstream Growth at Attractive Returns: Increasing demands for short-term performance and the changing nature of opportunities for reserve additions are forcing oil companies to rethink their approach to exploration. Which strategies and operating models will reposition exploration as a vehicle for growth?
	Winning in the Global Gas Market: LNG is becoming increasingly important in regional gas markets. How will it change gas pricing dynamics? How will it impact regional markets and the value chain? What are the implications for players?
	Changing Refined Product Markets: Current trends in crude oil and refined product markets have the potential to drive and/or significantly change the economics of heavy crude upgrading. What are the strategic implications for producers, refiners, and integrated players?
	Framing the Retail Solution Space: What is the future of petroleum retailing for major oil companies? Many are choosing to exit the business in the face of increasing competition, falling margins, and limited retailing skills. Is this shortsighted on their part? Is there a compelling case for re-committing to retail?

We also offer our clients distinctive, hands-on approaches, underpinned by strong functional capabilities, for improving performance in each part of the value chain:

	Upstream: We believe significant value creation potential exists in upstream petroleum operations. McKinsey has developed a successful approach to holistic, systemic improvement with proven impact. Our work aligns strategy with operating systems and organization, and leverages thinking on lean manufacturing and change management.
	Refining: We have years of experience helping our clients improve operational performance at their refineries. Ours is an integrated approach that both diagnoses and streamlines operating practices using lean maintenance and optimization tools, and also implements change management techniques involving mindsets and behaviors.
	Commercial Sales & Marketing: We believe commercial sales and marketing is a significantly under-exploited lever in improving downstream returns. Our Practice has in place a distinctive approach to help our clients capture this opportunity. We offer an integrated go-to-market approach that focuses on capturing sources of value leakage within 5 key levers (pricing, channel, sales force, branding, innovation) and pulling key organizational enablers such as front-line capabilities. We have client experience in multiple situations, a growing number of practitioners, a diagnostic approach to identify key opportunities and provide a basis for program design, and a modular toolkit.
	Retail Marketing: We have developed tools and techniques to help clients improve their performance in the retail gasoline sector. We offer a detailed diagnostic to quantify improvement potential, along with targeted improvement modules that focus on identifying key value drivers and concrete improvement targets and objectives. Modules include store operations, front line performance, category management, fuel pricing, channel management, format renewal, launching new formats, and brand repositioning. Each module includes diagnostic tools, guides, and client case studies.